Michele Dunaway

Michele Dunaway is an award-winning English and journalism teacher who, in addition to teaching English III, advises the student newspaper, yearbook and news website at Francis Howell High School in St. Charles, MO. In 2009, the Journalism Education Association awarded Michele with its Medal of Merit. She has received recognition as a Distinguished Yearbook Adviser in the H.L. Hall Yearbook Adviser of the Year competition and was named a Special Recognition Newspaper Adviser by the Dow Jones News Fund. She also practices what she teaches by authoring professional journal articles and writing novels.

Michelle Dunaway, who teaches English and journalism at Francis Howell High School in St. Charles, Missouri, writes that interviewing is an integral part of teaching students about public speaking. She encourages English teachers to think of interviewing as "a way for students to start small in building up their public speaking repertoire."
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Kitty. Tron. Legit. All these words appeared in the 2011 edition of the yearbook I sponsor. Students used these as slang; all three were used to describe something cool. Aside from legit, which seems to have been around for a while, I'm not sure the other two stuck.
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The day after Halloween, my Facebook feed exploded with posts about numbers. "I've written 5,200 words!" one friend exclaimed. Another claimed to have written 2,300. Someone else only had 1,500. And so on.
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Okay, now that I've got your attention, let's talk hooks. In journalism we might call these leads, but the general concept is the same. Those first few lines are essential in catching your reader's attention, whether you're a novelist or a student writing an essay.
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In my column "The Dead Letter Classroom," I argued that we needed to be teaching students how to write letters. In this piece, I'm going to tell you specifically how I do it and how I use letters to teach English skills in a timely, relevant manner.
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I used to be a personal journal person. Every January I would buy one of those 6x9 inch spiral wildlife calendars, the kind where you can see a week at a glance and have lots of space to write. At the end of each day, before I turned off my light, I'd scrawl in very tiny handwriting all my thoughts for the day. Sometimes I didn't say much. Other times I went into the margins or the white space below the pictures.
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